They answered the call: with generosity and complete freedom, 40 writers felt compelled to write about libraries. For libraries.
Their texts bear witness to their attachment to what these places represented in their childhood and later in their adult life, to what they embody and still symbolize in our era where public services are becoming fragile everywhere.
Essential links in our cultural heritage, libraries are grounds for learning, thinking, diversity, discovery, and openness. Places of connection where one can feel a little less alone in this age of statistics, algorithms, and artificial intelligence. Places where, while books matter, they are not mere commodities: they are borrowed, returned… Value of use and use of values.
More than ever, despite the lack of resources and doubts about their future, libraries, rich in their differences, are places to protect, zones to defend, refuges, spaces for welcome, sharing, exchange, and escape. They are islands of an archipelago that must be cared for, for what it can and must do: emancipate.
From one library to another... Utopia(s)? Welcome! Romain Boissié, librarian in Pujols, in Lot-et-Garonne.
